Friday, May 06, 2016

From the Collision Conference last week, here's Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg revealing some new footage of Project Sansar -- both creating scenes in VR, and some new sample scenes, including a photographic recreation of an ancient Egyptian site, a North Pole/Antartica scene, and more footage of that sample Mars we've seen in recent months -- including more than one avatar. Scroll past the opening boilerplate, which is mostly stuff regular readers are already familiar with -- the action starts at about 8:18 in.

Some screengrabs below -- watch and discuss over the weekend! In his talk, Ebbe revealed something that made my jaw drop -- did you catch it?

oddly enough this reminds me of HiFi, which currently in beta, which suggests Rosedale is quicker on the uptake than LL. However, I notice that the content that so far has been created for Sansar is more polished, whereas HiFi looks still somewhat goofy. Don't think either of the platforms will really launch VR in the mass market direction because they are still equipment heavy to really do anything productive and interesting. Despite Ebbe's (spelling?) statement that equipment price will rapidly go down, I think it is still niche until the price point of about a current generation gaming console and has been improved radically in terms of ease of controls and maybe even with native support (no computers, just the headset and accessories).

"Ebbe revealed something that made my jaw drop -- did you catch it?" err curious as to what that was, really, as think I missed it.

So - its got vive controllers working to shift stuff around? OK, makes sense and nice to see how clumsy they seem to be. Hope they won't be compulsory.
75 staff? seems about right.
A Marketplace to buy stuff (from full 'experiences' to props)? seems bleedin' obvious, to steal a phrase:)
People can make money via selling stuff... erm yes?
Take a zillion poly model and have to tweak it a lot to get 'performant' - yep, check.
Current cash generated from SL is being used to pay for the new project? Well, d'oh, thats how biz works so that also makes sense.

Seems the Lab have basically a rather nice engine there almost ready to go. The fact the ceo is couching it in almost SL terms is - not all that surprising really. For one thing, they are the only ones so far to make a going concern out of the idea.
Inara Pey makes the point that runtime/user aspect are distinct which also makes sense as a dev engine for 'experiences'.
Oh - and they have someone called Jason who arranges rocks. Always a plus point.

Overall, looking not too bad at all and having followed the hifi stuff so far (and all the others that have come and gone), actually rather better than not too bad.

I wonder if they're considering a way to digitalize our RL appearance on our VR avatars (not neccassarily photo-realistic). It may seem creepy for an SL user, but I feel that is really needed to create "social VR experiences" in a way the mainstream audience they're aiming for really understands...